Who’s lowering the standards for ‘high-standard farmland’?
In November 2025, Zhao Lishun, a farmer from Meishan, watched the village’s rice paddies go unharvested, shaking his head in dismay. Yet these fields no longer belonged to him, nor to the villagers, but to the “bosses”—large-scale land contractors from out of town who had acquired the plots through land transfer agreements. By the end of 2024, hundreds of mu of land across several village teams had been consolidated, transferred, and converted into “high-standard farmland” (hereafter referred to as “high-standard fields”).
In the eyes of the villagers, however, these poorly tended plots were far from meeting any “high standard”. It was not until after the Spring Equinox that the boss carelessly scattered the rice seeds. Recalling the sowing, Zhao described handfuls of seeds thrown directly into the dry paddies without being raised in seedbeds first, scattered so densely it was as if they cost nothing. He wondered what on earth such a method could possibly yield.
By autumn, the harvest actually turned out better than the villagers had expected. They guessed it might be because the boss had chosen a good variety, but more likely it was due to heavy use of chemical fertilisers and herbicides. “The drones just flew straight overhead,” one villager gestured.
Unfortunately, relentless rain in October delayed the harvest. The boss did not seem nearly as concerned about the yield as the local smallholder farmers. With much of the grain already mouldy, tracked tractors from out of town finally rumbled into the waterlogged, sodden paddies on 8 November. Some of the lodged rice was beyond saving, and several plots were left completely unharvested. The boss left a message: “You can take whatever you can gather from what’s left.”
Those who gathered the rice mostly only dared to feed it to their chickens.
Beyond the haphazard management, Zhao Lishun also felt the field ridges had been raised too high. He once pointed with evident distress at a plot that was simultaneously cracked and waterlogged. Official jargon describes high-standard farmland as “consolidated and contiguous, with complete facilities,” but on this plot, excessive waterlogging had already breached the high ridges. “It’s no longer arable!” he exclaimed. He couldn’t help but wonder: the operators of the excavators had never farmed a day in their lives. When redesigning the fields, why wasn’t any advice sought from the local veteran farmers?
His observations stand in stark contrast to the stated objectives for high-standard farmland: “levelled land, consolidated plots, comprehensive facilities, supporting agricultural infrastructure, fertile soil, a sound ecology, strong disaster resilience, and reliable yields irrespective of drought or flood, ensuring high and stable production adapted to modern agricultural practices.”
Year after year, the Central Committee’s No. 1 Document has repeatedly called for accelerating the development of high-standard farmland, regarding it as an indispensable step for safeguarding national food security. This safeguard operates on two fronts: first, boosting grain output by enhancing the quality of arable land; and second, fostering large-scale agricultural operations through land transfer schemes, thereby addressing the dilemma of “who will farm the land in the future.”
To date, China has constructed 66.7 million hectares (1 billion mu) of high-standard farmland, representing two-thirds of the nation’s 154.6 million hectares of permanent basic farmland. In April 2025, the General Office of the Central Committee issued a directive aiming to convert all eligible permanent basic farmland into high-standard plots by 2035.
Yet, the “high standard” enshrined in official directives quickly devolves into a “low standard” out in the fields. The modified soil and irrigation systems often fail to align with practical farming needs, and in some instances even become the very catalyst for land abandonment—an absurd scenario now unfolding across numerous regions.
The land-transfer scheme, implemented alongside these physical renovations, has also driven a wedge between the villagers and their land. In several villages around Chengdu, village committees have urged local groups to consolidate household plots, which are then collectively leased by village cooperatives to a single “lead enterprise”. This company pays villagers a land-transfer fee while seeking suitable contractors to take over the fields. Some are deeply distressed to see their plots unrecognisable after the overhaul, while others readily embrace the change, motivated by the 600–800 yuan per mu in rental income.
Yet, merging small plots into larger fields does not automatically guarantee higher yields or improved efficiency. Whoever manages these consolidated plots will face steep costs if, upon realising that farming is both arduous and unprofitable, they decide to withdraw and the land must be broken back up for smallholder farmers. Consequently, who will be held accountable for the land and food security? And to what extent have these renovations truly achieved the stated aim of “high-standard” cultivation?
I. Consolidating Small Plots into Large Fields: Turning Fertile Earth into Poor Soil
However, when the villagers’ small plots arranged like fish scales were merged into large, continuous fields, it proved difficult to achieve perfectly uniform elevation across the entire area. Low-lying spots naturally began to pool water. Locals say that over the years, this unevenness tends to worsen. Four years after completion, by 2025, the village collective of Village B, also near Chengdu, was forced to hire contractors to re-level the land. The 300-plus mu of rice paddies cost over 300 yuan per mu to remediate, draining nearly 100,000 yuan in one go and delaying spring planting. The village secretary explained this was already the second major modification since the initial high-standard upgrade. “Before this second fix, it was even worse—here a puddle, there a puddle,” he said.
Xu Rentian has long worked in agricultural extension across Sichuan. He argues that, unlike the sandy loam typical of the plains, Sichuan’s hilly regions are predominantly clay. This soil has a tighter structure, making it far more labour-intensive to level. The original farmers had spent years carefully cultivating the land to create those staggered, yet smooth, terraced platforms. Given the vast scale of high-standard fields, expecting excavator operators to replicate such precision “by feel” is simply unrealistic.
In Village A, where pears are grown, more than 30 mu of the 1,000-mu plot consist of sloping ground that has suffered from chronic waterlogging. Zhang Xiaoqin, who works in the orchard, explained that the water levels rise even higher in summer. The owner dug additional drainage ditches, and workers tried every trick to channel the water away, but the pears in this small patch still drowned, and machinery remained grounded. Before the transformation, this area had actually been where the village’s rice grew best.
During visits to several villages in Sichuan, Xu Runtian found that under the current drive to consolidate small plots into larger fields, anyone wishing to farm now has to dig drainage ditches from scratch following the high-standard upgrades; otherwise, water simply cannot be drained away. If the company taking over the land does not handle the excavation, the task falls to the village collective or individual farmers.
Merging plots typically goes hand in hand with soil modification. According to the 2013 *National Master Plan for High-Standard Farmland Construction*, field reclamation must prioritise the preservation of soil fertility: fertile topsoil is to be stripped and carefully replaced, with the effective soil layer depth exceeding 50 cm and the tillage layer depth surpassing 20 cm. “Effective soil layer depth” has consistently served as a core metric for the acceptance of high-standard farmland projects. Yet in practice, meeting these benchmarks is rarely achieved.
Several village party secretaries and large-scale growers in Zhijin County, Guizhou, told Foodthink that during the high-standard renovations, excavators routinely buried the fertile soil and turned up raw subsoil, while the mandated 1,500 kg of organic matter per mu vanished without a trace. “We’ve destroyed the little good soil our people had left. You can’t grow rice, and you can’t grow maize either. All you can do is leave it fallow and let the weeds take over,” one village secretary said, voice heavy with regret. They feel the policy’s original intent was commendable, but its execution went off course.
II. When Engineering Mindsets Clash with Agriculture: More Technology or More Corruption?
In Meishan, Zhao Lishun’s village also constructed two irrigation pumping stations last spring. Yet he has never seen any water flow from them. During the height of the spring drought, villagers still had to draw water from the river themselves, burning out one of their electric pumps in the process.
In mid-June 2024, Henan province was gripped by a severe drought. Journalists visited ten villages in Xiayi County at random and found that the deep tube wells on the high-standard farmland were generally not yielding water. In some cases, there was no electricity supply; in others, the pipes had not been properly laid. Desperate for water, farmers were forced to dismantle the smart irrigation equipment fitted to the wells, reverting to traditional pumping methods to water their crops. Some even resorted to using electric tricycles to charge the well pumps, managing to irrigate just four *mu* of land every two days. After more than ten days of unrelenting drought, a heavy downpour finally brought relief.
A kiwifruit grower in Shaanxi province also had drip irrigation systems installed in their orchard as part of the high-standard upgrades. This marks the third overhaul of the orchard’s canal irrigation system, following the Water Resources Bureau’s “water-saving irrigation project” and the National Development and Reform Commission’s “ecological orchard scheme”. “We’d just joke: ‘Rush through the installation, then the locals can rip it out, while you take the funding and run,’” he told Foodthink. Drip irrigation, he explained, relies on pressurising and filtering the water supply. Yet the contractors merely ran pipes from the canal to draw water. “It’s like trying to inflate a car tyre without a compressor.” Ultimately, these impractical, all-theory pipes were destined for the scrap heap.
One of the stated aims of upgrading to high-standard farmland is to ensure stable harvests regardless of drought or flooding. Yet in practice, such shoddy construction could leave farmers even more exposed to extreme weather.
In recent years, frequent reports across various regions have highlighted cases of corners being cut and plots being left to lie fallow and overgrown in high-standard farmland projects. Alongside the examples outlined earlier, these incidents point to a clear possibility: the top-down, multi-tier subcontracting model inherently creates fertile ground for corruption.
According to survey data from relevant departments as reported by the People’s Political Consultative Conference Daily, the average construction cost for high-standard farmland nationwide in 2020 was 3,046 yuan per mu, reaching over 5,000 yuan in some hilly and mountainous areas. In the recollections of Xu Runtian and A Village’s former party secretary, town officials once indicated that the funding allocated for high-standard transformations was even higher than these figures.
In Binhai County, Yancheng City, Jiangsu Province, the 2022 construction of 115,000 mu of high-standard farmland involved a total investment of 349 million yuan. The following year, CCTV’s 315 Gala reported that the concrete pipes used for irrigation on these plots were widely plagued by exposed reinforcement bars, cracks, and other defects, falling short of national standards. The reason was straightforward: to cut costs, contractors consistently opted for cheap, substandard non-standard pipes, purchasing only a few sections of regulation-compliant pipes to pass off to inspectors.
In 2024, a journalist from Yicai reviewed available data and found that at least twelve provincial reports had flagged irregularities in the construction of high-standard farmland. These included projects planned on forest or grassland, tender documents containing restrictive clauses to exclude potential bidders, agricultural wells dug without prior hydrogeological surveys, inflated project figures to embezzle public funds, and plots left idle and overgrown.
These construction issues are shuffled between parties, ultimately festering into a grassroots governance quagmire. In A Village, the former party secretary noted that the high-standard farmland project dragged on for several years before final sign-off could be obtained. “The handover process is bogged down. The contractors haven’t been paid in full, and villagers are complaining about unfinished work everywhere—‘This wasn’t done right, that wasn’t done right’—and it seems the local government won’t take it over either.” Afterwards, the contractors would return to the village to carry out piecemeal repairs.
A study by scholars including Guo Xiaoming reveals a widespread disconnect across China between the entities responsible for constructing, utilising, and maintaining high-standard farmland. Once the builders have moved on, the responsibility for upkeep is often left stranded with the village committee.
According to this research, upon completion, high-standard farmland is typically inspected by county-level agriculture and rural affairs departments. The assets created, such as farm roads and irrigation infrastructure, must then be handed over to township governments and, depending on the project’s actual build, formally transferred to the village collective. The study also cites data from a State Council audit report: In 2023, across 16 provinces, 46 counties, towns, and villages, 2,761 agricultural infrastructure projects costing 6.929 billion yuan were left idle due to a lack of supporting facilities, an overemphasis on construction at the expense of management, and other issues.
The aforementioned insider familiar with the land administration system in a central province also told Foodthink that contract payments for numerous high-standard projects within the province remain outstanding, while many officials and contractors involved have already been taken in for questioning by relevant authorities.
After observing the operational mechanisms of high-standard farmland across multiple regions, Chen Jingjing, a researcher specialising in agricultural and rural development, concluded: “On the surface, there are standards, procedures, and oversight. In reality, it is entirely performative. Everyone is ‘playing along’ to meet what is deemed a proper, modern framework.” During field visits, Foodthink found that at the grassroots level, whether village party secretaries, squad leaders, or ordinary villagers, nobody has the means to steer this bureaucratic “performance” back on track.
III. Is scaling up the key to improving agricultural efficiency?
Yet, scaling up agricultural operations does not automatically translate into higher overall farm returns.
Of the numerous villages surveyed by Foodthink, Village B stands out as the only one that continues to farm and manage its fields through a village collective after undergoing high-standard upgrades. The village commands a substantial land area of over 5,000 mu, supported by a workforce of six to seven hundred residents who have stayed behind. The village party secretary, who has served the community for twelve years, laid out the financial ledger for cultivation since the land upgrades began, following four years of running the collective enterprise.
By the end of 2021, the village had submitted 800 mu of land for high-standard conversion, intending to grow two grain crops a year. “With the fields consolidated into larger plots, we assumed mechanised planting would cut costs and labour, while making it easier to hire hands,” the village secretary explained.
Yet, once land moves away from the traditional system of contracting fields to individual households, the reduced reliance on manual labour places a far heavier demand on the growers’ field-management skills. In 2021, the collective’s 550 mu of soybeans suffered a severe pest outbreak during the first season. The planted area was simply too vast to monitor closely, and the crop was completely lost.
Compounding the problem, as noted earlier, excavators had stripped away the fertile topsoil during the upgrades. As a result, the 350 mu of rice paddy operated at a loss, yielding a mere 200 jin per mu. Under identical drought conditions, plots left untouched by the high-standard conversion—and tended with greater care by individual villagers—still managed yields of around 800 jin per mu.
Farming is an intricate business that demands both management acumen and hard-won experience. Indeed, before 2021, Village B had spent four years leasing land to outside investors for lotus root cultivation. Yet within three or four years, the investors’ profits dwindled to the point where they could no longer justify the rent of 600 yuan per mu. They simply pulled out.
In 2023, the village collective overhauled its management model. Field operations were handed back to local farming cooperatives, overseen by cooperative heads and compensated with a base fee of 30 yuan per mu plus a commission based on yield. That autumn, the rice harvest rebounded to between 800 and 900 jin per mu.
Although the cultivated area has grown steadily each year, the village secretary is candid: even in a bumper season, a thousand-mu operation will barely net more than 300,000 yuan. As one might expect, for outside investors rolling in with millions seeking rural business opportunities, the return on capital in agriculture pales in comparison to industry or services.
Worth noting is that Village B also secured large-scale cultivation subsidies covering nearly 2,000 mu: 200 yuan per mu for rice, 350 yuan for intercropped maize and soybeans, and between 200 and 300 yuan for wheat. These grants effectively make up half of the total profit from grain farming.
“I quite enjoy making money from state subsidies,” the village secretary revealed, with a wry candour that left much to ponder.
IV. Who Ends Up Taking Over: Business Owners, Villagers, or Others?
More than one villager remarked that the company’s directors are invariably squabbling (arguing) come the end of the year, with shareholders occasionally having to front their own money to cover wage bills. It is hard to see how they are turning a profit.
When no willing operator steps forward to take on the land, the lead company is still bound to continue paying land-transfer fees to the villagers.
In Village C, according to Xu Runtian, the land was handed back to the village committee roughly a year or two after the high-standard upgrading work was completed. The lead company continues to make payments, but they have grown increasingly tardy. “At this point, I haven’t got a clue whether the money will actually arrive,” joked one elderly resident. “When the leases first began, there were no delays—payments came through straight away. By the second year, they only arrived midway. Now? It’s practically blown.”
As for the newcomers to Meishan who harvest for a mere three days before packing up and leaving large tracts of land fallow, Xu Runtian notes that he has witnessed similar negligence elsewhere: operators scattering seeds and then walking away, ultimately abandoning the harvest. His assessment is that the revenue from selling the paddy rice often falls short of even covering the cost of hiring a harvest crew.
Running parallel to the distortion of these high-standard projects is a steady erosion of villages’ capacity for collective action and mutual oversight.
Part of the issue stems from the consolidation of small plots into large ones, which has erased traditional ridge boundaries and disrupted the original field layout. Some parcels have been permanently absorbed by new roads and irrigation infrastructure, making it nearly impossible to restore them to individual households. Xu Runtian has encountered this scenario in numerous locations: once the upgraded farmland is left without an operator, it is exceedingly difficult for villagers to resume cultivation on their own without a capable local figure to step in and coordinate the effort.
In nearby Village D, which sits on the fringe of the urban expansion zone, residents were notified during the renovation year that land expropriation might be imminent. Consequently, no company felt willing to lease the land. Villagers never received a penny in land-transfer fees, yet the fields were left to lie fallow for more than three years.
One resident who subsequently joined the Village D committee recalled that, before cultivation could resume, the fields had become overrun with weeds standing taller than a person. Driven by national policy mandates against leaving land fallow, the village committee mobilised the community to clear the undergrowth. Excavators were brought in to dig fresh irrigation channels across the consolidated plots, and by 2024, new drainage piping had been laid. The cost of this secondary overhaul topped one hundred thousand yuan.
In Village A, the operator’s contract for the pear orchard runs for another three years before expiring. If the boss leaves, how will the land be redistributed? “They (the lead companies) will certainly have to work something out and give us a straight answer,” says Zhang Xiaoqin.
Meanwhile, as some villagers grow accustomed to taking waged work elsewhere while quietly collecting land transfer fees, fractures and mistrust are beginning to fester across generations and between villagers with competing interests.
Villages A, C, and D, visited in the outskirts of Chengdu, issued their bidding documents as early as 2017–2018, placing them among the first areas in Sichuan to undertake high-standard farmland upgrades. In Village A, when cracks appeared in the newly constructed field embankments, the villagers stopped volunteering to patch them up. “After all, nobody’s farming anymore.” In Village C, once the lead company effectively “cut its losses” and walked away, the village committee proved incapable of organising large-scale cultivation, and several neglected irrigation works were simply left to fall into disrepair.
In Village A, Teams 1 and 2 initially refused to take part in the high-standard upgrades. A handful of older residents took on land contracts and insisted on cultivating them themselves. But time has caught up with them; they are now too old to keep working the land. The community has come to accept that the window for policy subsidies has closed and no investors will return.“The younger generation blames them, asking why they didn’t lease out and upgrade when they had the chance,” the veteran party secretary remarks with a wry smile.
What the villagers observe is unmistakable: the rural labour force is dwindling, and land consolidation and transfer are irreversible trends. Yet if the mechanics of the “large-scale field” model break down, the cost of readjustment will be steep. Meanwhile, the original owners of the “small plots” are gradually losing their ancestral farming knowledge and their connection to the land. When confronted with poorly adapted soil and water conditions, meagre returns from grain cultivation, or mismanagement, both corporate operators and individual farmers are quick to opt for abandoning the land altogether.
As these high-standard fields—designed to safeguard national food security—collide with the messy realities of agriculture, how well do they actually suit a rigid, engineering-led approach? How can corruption be rooted out across the lengthy chain of operation, management, and maintenance, while ensuring genuine productivity gains and accommodating complex topographies like hills and mountains? Are high-standard fields truly underpinning food security, or merely acting as a cash cow for agricultural subsidies? With the transformation programme now roughly two-thirds complete, these questions demand more thoughtful answers.
Edited by: Ling Yu, Tianle